Heather Idoni, a homeschooling mother, originator of HomeschoolingBOYS and owner of Beloved Books (home of the Sugar Creek Gang audio series), is a speaker on homeschooling topics at conferences and curriculum fairs. Heather edits The Homeschooler’s Notebook, and also manages EasyFunSchool as well as several other websites and homeschooling email groups.

Heather has also been the target of an ongoing campaign by Mimi Rothschild to discredit her for taking a principled stand against Mimi’s notoriously unethical business practices, and now Heather is embroiled in a lawsuit brought against her by Mimi.

A short excerpt (click the link above to read Heather’s post in it’s entirety):

While I was not surprised to be threatened with a lawsuit by Rothschild, I was completely taken aback to find out, by Mimi’s own admission, that (supposedly as a result of my newsletter issue last August), there were at least 4 major homeschool conferences who refused to allow one or more of her companies to be vendors at their major state conventions recently. Some of these she had been admitted to in past years; at least one had already accepted her application and payment. I have never spoken or had any correspondence personally with any of these decision makers — I can only believe that they made their decisions based on what they read independently on the Internet; heartrending stories of despair and desperation from Christian homeschooling families who realized, too late, that they had been taken.

According to an article on the news blog for Channel 9 News in Chattanooga, Tennessee: Home schooling has increased in popularity across the country and here in Chattanooga. NewsChannel 9 hit the hallways for the first day of Hamilton County schools this week, and now we want to go to where home schooled students hit their books.

In the last decade, the number of homeschoolers has far more than doubled, according to the Department of Education. And Hamilton County has seen some of its largest crowds at the last two expos. NewsChannel 9 sought to find out why.

For Megan Abel, and for most grade-schoolers, starting school after summer break means new notebooks, new subject matter and a new routine. But the 7-year-old Abel doesn’t have to leave the comfort of her home. And her teacher is her mom.

As homeschoolers, Megan and her sister, Hope, won’t be filling the hallways and desks of area public schools at the end of this month. But the start of a new school year still brings a similar sense of excitement and anticipation.

“We still look forward to fresh crayons, markers and notebooks. And just that fresh start,” said Hope’s mother, Christy Abel. “It’s nice to get back to the routine.”

Megan said she’s looking forward to science.

“I’m excited for school to start because of science. I just love science,” she said.

“Some home-school parents create their own curriculum for their kids. “There should never be a set curriculum,” said [Janice] Hedin. “Every child is so unique. Our goal as parents is to custom design the education that fits our children.”

The writer interviewed Home Education Magazine co-publisher Helen Hegener, who is also Director of the American Homeschool Association:

As a first step, parents new to home schooling should check out their state’s laws. Helen Hegener, director of the American Homeschool Association, noted that there is a wide variety in state requirements.

The usual statisics were quoted:

The National Center of Education Statistics reported last April that about 1.5 million American children were home-schooled in 2007, representing 2.9 percent of the school-age population. The number of home-school children increased by 74 percent since 1999. The upward trend is believed to be continuing.

In an article for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, descriptively titled Home schooling as a respite rather than a retreat from public schools, reporter Maureen Downey explains how Laura Brodie, author of the popular book Love in a Time of Homeschooling, never intended to embrace homeschooling full-time, calling herself a public school parent who chose to home school to meet her child’s needs. “Now, from a vantage of several years later, Brodie can see her missteps as a home-schooling parent.”

Police say the malnourished girl was locked in a bathroom without running water for two months, beaten with metal rods and forced to exercise until exhaustion because her father said she had stolen food and cheated on a home-school test.

The ‘news’ in this post is that the AP has picked up this story. Expect another round of anti-homeschooling fervor.

Homeschooling has been implicated in abuse and HEM has covered abuse cases in the past. Abuse is abuse, and, as in this case, it is a shocking, sad thing. I will, once again, ask the larger hard question – Who is encouraging these families to torture their kids? They need to be called out.

Online high schools are growing more popular. Roughly 100,000 of the 12 million high-school-age students in the U.S. attend 438 online schools full-time, up from 30,000 five years ago, according to the International Association for K-12 Learning Online, a Washington nonprofit representing online schools. Many more students take some classes online, while attending traditional schools. The National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education, says 1.5 million K-12 students were home-schooled in 2007, a figure that includes some who attended online schools. That is a 36% increase from the 1.1 million in 2003.

The part that caught my eye was how homeschooling was used in this line of reasoning:

Most online high schools are relatively young, and there has been little research on cyber students’ academic performance or social adaptation. But education experts say that studies looking at home-schooling suggest that students educated in nontraditional environments perform as well academically as their peers at conventional schools.

“When you look at home-school students compared to public or private school students, we have some reliable evidence to show that students are doing about the same but not better [in home school],” said Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College at Columbia University.

Researchers affiliated with home-schooling cite their own studies showing that home schoolers outperform their conventionally educated counterparts on standardized tests.

So readers are reassured that, as public education moves towards online schooling, we do not have to be afraid because homeschoolers are academically normal. I would argue we are ahead of the curve on thinking about kids and learning. But, isn’t it implied by this reassurance that homeschoolers are leading the way?

From this piece in the WSJ to a recent WaPo piece on a longer school year, the language surrounding reform has a familiar ring. The big difference is on the substance of assessment. Too bad so much effort and emphasis was put into those “researchers affiliated with home-schooling” who purposefully tied us to outperforming “conventionally educated counterparts on standardized tests.” If the same amount of effort had been expended on the message that we should trust parent and children with their own education we would be in much better shape to handle the push for Common Core Standards that will help drive a new round of reform.

I purposefully skipped the headline issue because concern about socialization is such a non-homeschooling issue. If you haven’t resolve the socialization issue for yourself the comments to Glader’s story are interesting. You can also search this site for more thoughts on the subject. Here is a place to start: The “S” Word.

… many of us know people that home school their children. Home Schooling has many advantages but one of the criticisms launched against the practice is that children sometimes lack the elective skills, such as shop or art that kids in regular school receive. One local group of parents are trying to remedy that by starting a Home School Co-Op.

The re-write.

Many of us know people who send their children to public school. Public school has many advantages, but one of the criticisms launched against the practice is that schoolchildren sometimes lack social skills. Anti-social behavior associated with school attendance ranges from young people walking down the middle of the road after school and daring drivers to run over them, to carrying weapons to school. One local group of parents is trying to remedy that by starting an After School Co-Op where young people will have civilized behavior modeled for them by caring adults.

Vouchers just one more way of subsidizing education, 14 July 2007, Salt Lake Tribune, Salt Lake City, Utah My neighbor hates school vouchers because he does not believe that taxpayers should subsidize families choosing to send their children to private schools. He often says, “Utah families already have school choice. They can send their kids to public, private or home schools. Why should I pay for the personal choices of families to send their children to private schools?”

To which I respond that my wife and I pay large amounts of state income taxes each year to subsidize the education of neighbor children even though we home-school our own.

…

By contrast, my family has saved taxpayers $360,000 and has benefited the public school system by another $100,000 in taxes. We agree that we want every child to receive a good education. That’s why I support school vouchers – if we are going to subsidize every child’s education anyway then why not let parents choose what is best for their own children?

For a long time, I was on the fence about vouchers. My gut feeling was, ‘no,’ but I didn’t have anything to cement the feeling to the ‘no.’ While researching a response to Kimberly Yuracko (which should be in next month’s Home Education Magazine), I found one.

James Dwyer appears to have the most novel set of reasons for preferring a school voucher program; he would use such a program as a way of limiting the influence of traditional religious beliefs in the education of children. JAMES DWYER, VOUCHERS WITHIN REASON: A CHILD CENTERED APPROACH TO EDUCATION REFORM (2002). [capitals in original]

The book I read, which included the ‘control education via vouchers’ idea was, Religious Schools v. Children’s Rights by Prof. Dwyer. My impression after the one reading that I had before the inter-library loan time ran out, was ‘enforced neutrality of everyone’ rather than ‘everyone pluralistically equal.’

In the next story, there appears to be no intention on the part of the family to continue homeschooling after the sentence is served (“home-school” is a punishment, not a choice by the family) so why doesn’t the school just treat the boy as homebound?

An assistant prosecuting attorney agreed Thursday to strict probation for a 13-year-old boy who brought a handgun into Hiland Middle School.

The agreement was made on the condition detention at a youth services facility be imposed if the boy fails to meet obligations outlined in a plea agreement.

…

“(The boy) has been expelled for one year since May, so he won’t be able to return to school until the end of the next school year,” Raber said. “It will be important for him to continue to work on his education, so he can come back ready to learn.”

…

Ginsberg ordered the boy’s probation to continue indefinitely, and ordered a review hearing on the boy’s progress to be held in no less than 90 days. He ordered the boy enroll in a home-school program and released him from electronically monitored house arrest, imposed by the court in April.

If the intent is to have the boy return to school, why not have him keep up exactly with his classmates?

The practice of schools teaching children at home is common enough in Ohio for at least one telephone company to have a standard operating procedure, and billing charge, for “homebound.”

Homebound Student School Service, 5 March 2007, United Telephone Company of Ohio

Homebound student school service is an intercommunication service designed for two-way conversation for schoolroom instruction to students who are unable to attend school. The school and home both have portable and/or permanent stations consisting of a combined speaker-microphone and amplifier.